


Suspect Profile and Character Study: Ellie Miller

by Veringue



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Family, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Multi, Poetry, Prose Poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-08 01:28:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5478191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veringue/pseuds/Veringue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A piece of prose (poetry) about how Ellie Miller learned to live - with the knowledge that Joe Miller was a killer (Trigger warning: mention of suicide)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suspect Profile and Character Study: Ellie Miller

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! Just publishing a short piece on here!
> 
> I posted this on my Tumblr (missjordanbakers under the tag 'my fanfiction') this September after we binge-watched 'Broadchurch' S2, but this piece is actually looking back to Ellie's character at the end of S1, through the prism of S2, so to speak. I had fun writing it, so I thought I would put it up here anyway!
> 
> Thank you for reading, and I hope you like it! Comments always make me very happy. Thank you!

_Suspect Profile and Character Study: Ellie Miller_

_A piece of prose (poetry) about how Ellie Miller learned to live_

There are some things we just can’t know about people. We can’t and we can’t. We can’t know and we can’t take knowing. There are some things just not meant to be known by some people. We can’t know how Ellie Miller lived after she found out that her husband, Joe Miller, was a killer. But we can speculate. Some things aren’t about facts, but just about people. Like not knowing the killer was in your house, that he slept with you every night except the nights he spent with the boy he killed, except that night when he killed the boy he killed. No fact could convince a wife that her husband was a killer. You could tell her: _Your husband wasn’t in your bed that night. Your husband was on the beach that night. His hands were around Danny Latimer’s neck that night._ And so on and so forth. You couldn’t convince her. So Ellie Miller had to go, had to look Joe Miller in the eye, and had to see – unburdened by the weight of the case she was trying to find the right answer to – that he wasn’t who she thought he was. And she beat him up. Because some things aren’t about facts, but just about people. _You’re wrong_ , she had said to Hardy. She had meant: you’re wrong about the facts. She didn’t even think to think: you’re wrong about Joe. That spoke for itself. But then she saw him, Joe – pitiful, pitiless – and she saw that Hardy wasn’t wrong. She was.

Detectives can afford to be wrong about facts, because facts can escape them, sometimes hopelessly, blamelessly. Facts sometimes aren’t facts. Facts can be contorted by people. It wouldn’t be the detectives’ fault, if they were wrong about facts. When she said to Hardy, _You’re wrong_ , it was the kind of wrong Hardy could afford to be. When Ellie looked at Joe, and heard her words spoken back to her, silently, she knew she was the kind of wrong that could very well kill her. Like the kind of wrong that haunted Hardy from Sandbrook, that could’ve killed him. We can’t know how Ellie Miller survived that day, or that night, or any of the days or nights after that. How she survived being wrong, so wrong, so unforgivably wrong, about her husband. But we can speculate. Did she go back to the office and feel the people’s sorry eyes upon her and not know how to breathe (which she’d never not known, in all her life-long career, except for a minute moment when she was born)? Did she go and collect her things from the house where she used to live with her husb– the killer and see a picture of herself with her husb– the killer and not know herself in the picture? Did she get driven to the hotel and look out the window and not know how to look? Did she sit with her children and not know they were her own? Maybe they weren’t anymore.

We know she went to the Latimers’ house in the dead of night and stood outside it for an hour before Beth Latimer came out and asked her: _How could you not know?_ Yes, we were far past the _Didn’t you know?_ We were far past the _What did you know?_ We were at the gnawing, terrorising _how: How could you not know? How_ could you be a detective and not know? Those two things couldn’t coexist. If you could not know this one thing that you had to have known, more than anything else in this world, then it’s equally likely you don’t know how to exist in this world, where your one job is to be _right_ , in the end, not to be _wrong_ , to _know_ , in the end, not to _not know_. And if being a detective was your job and you lived your job, and you were worthless at your job, were you worthy of your life? If you had been that wrong about this one thing that weighed the weight of the world, why couldn’t you be that wrong about the rest of the world? And if the rest of the world gave you life so that you could bring it justice, what was your life worth? Not the justice it would take to find out how you took your life. Were these the thoughts that flitted, wordless, through Ellie Miller’s brain, as she stood, perhaps, and looked down the sheer drop of the cliff a short walk from the Latimers’ house? Were these the thoughts that haunted her as the wind battered her, seemed to try to make up its mind whether it would throw her down or no, whether it would become her mystery killer? As she walked back along the cliff, and to the harbour, and looked down at the water, deep and dark and kind, were these the thoughts that made her want to leap in?

We can’t know, but we know she didn’t leap. She lived. Somehow. Just as we can’t know _how_ she couldn’t know her husband was a killer, we can’t know _how_ his wife went on living. Can we know _why_ , however? Perhaps. Perhaps it was because the water was too cold that day, or the wind too bitter, or the cliff-top too dark. Perhaps it was because, unlike her husband, she couldn’t take a life, her own or anyone else’s. People might like to say it was because she cared more about others’ lives than her own, and would rather live a dead woman than die and rob, say, her children of their lives. But I don’t think that kind of selflessness exists. I don’t think any kind of selflessness exists. Life is solely selfish. It is born from selfishness (people who want to have children to commemorate themselves, like the Latimers) and it lives a selfish life (people who want to keep themselves alive, like Joe Miller, like Ellie Miller, like Danny Latimer, like practically anybody). And I think Ellie Miller’s reason for living was a singularly selfish one. To die, she had to take away her life. That is a fact. But if her life was who she was, and who she was was what she did, and what she did was being a detective, and being a detective was being right, not wrong, was knowing, in the end, not not knowing, then Ellie Miller had nothing to die for. Because here she was, in the end, at the end, and she was wrong, not right, and she had not known, hadn’t known a damn thing. She was dead to herself, like Joe Miller was dead to her. So, instead, she lived, selfishly. It was the kind of selfishness that people like to call selfless. She lived to know something, at least, something more, and to drip a drop of something called justice, everyday, into the ocean of unknown killers. She lived to be furious and alive and furiously right, at least, about Sandbrook. Ellie Miller even lived with her husband’s name, because she could bear his weight on top of her own, on top of the weight of the world, even.


End file.
